News Roundup: Things That Happened Last Week (And Some Analysis)

I get plenty of Press Releases, News, and Emails from people in the industry. Some of them are converted into Posts, some of them are good enough to know, some of them, well – I won’t tell you how to use Soda Pop to rob a bank, let’s just say that…

Parature is delighted to announce that we have hired Tim Davenport as our new CEO. Tim comes to us from Revolution Health Network and is the former CEO of several successful local software companies. Tim is the former CEO of Vastera where he set a very strategic agenda and grew the company which was eventually sold to JP Morgan Chase. Tim was also the CEO of Best Software. Best Software had a very successful IPO in 1997 and was one of the software industry’s most successful companies

I did get to ask a few questions, and it seems that this new CEO main focus is to grow the company (I should say continue to grow, since they have been tearing up quarters in excess of 40% lately) and help them penetrate both new markets and enter large enterprises. According to initial reports from employees, Tim has a great vision and seems ready to roll.

Confirmit, the leading global vendor of software for Customer Feedback, Employee Feedback and Market Research, and Clarabridge, the leading provider of text analytics solutions that improve customer experience management (CEM), today announced a partnership to drive contextual insight for global enterprises to a new level.

I got to talk to Confirmit about this, and it seems that they have a long-term goal of integrating both products very deeply. To me this is a move that we will see more and more in the near future (and the reason I wanted to highlight it). You probably heard me talk about Feedback Management a lot, and how the true value comes from structuring the unstructured. You also may have seen my previous post where I assert that Feedback Management is the fourth pillar in Social CRM. This is the first step towards making SCRM stick and be rewarding to organizations: collect all the feedback and information from Social Channels and transactions into a Feedback Management Tool (Confirmit), and use a Text Analytics tool (Clarabridge) to decode the unstructured and come up with — actionable insights: the value that SCRM provides to the organization (and the missing piece of most CRM implementations until today). This is going to be big, and you saw it here first…

Oracle Moves Social CRM Forward

At Oracle OpenWorld this week, Oracle announced their new lineup for Social CRM modules and some other enhancements to their Siebel CRM and CRM OnDemand offerings. I posted earlier in the week about this, so you can read more about it here and there (since it dominated the news, I had to post it here)